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Excerpts

THE SOUNDS OF THE HOSPITAL CAME BACK TO LUCY MUFFLED AND from far away. She became aware of a big hand holding hers—tough, dry, and warm.

Jonas, she thought with a twist of guilt.

Stiffly she moved her head and opened her eyes, expecting to read worry, relief—even anger—in his eyes.

Instead, for one crazy moment, she found she had been sucked through a tear in time, and that she was married to a small boy wearing a look of such terror on his face that she flinched and clutched at his hand as if he were the one who was falling.

“Jonas!”

Her throat burned and the word came out as a harsh caw, but it aged him like a slap in the face and immediately his eyes filled with all those emotions she’d expected to see when she first looked up at him—even the anger.

Lucy didn’t care. She brimmed with tears. Jonas held her in his arms—a man again—and she overflowed into the crook of his elbow while he bent over her and said quiet, tender things into her hair.

“I didn’t mean it,” she sobbed, but she couldn’t even understand her own muffled words.

And anyway, she wasn’t certain they were true.

© 2011 Belinda Bauer